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The Workday 2026R2 release is making its way to your tenant this September. Every release brings incredible potential to optimize your ecosystem, but deciphering the massive list of updates can easily lead to feature fatigue.
At Kognitiv, our Product Lead team is all about working smarter. We’ve poured over the latest release notes to curate a focused guide on the updates that actually move the needle. We've categorized the must-haves—both the quick wins you can leverage immediately and the larger enhancements worth configuring—so you can skip the reading and jump straight to planning.
This guide is your shortcut to mastering 2026R2. We’ll walk you through where to focus your energy and how to map these innovations directly to your business goals.
Performance Enablement
In the Career section of employee review templates, Workday adds a new Include Career Interest check box, which enables the new Include Skill Interest check box. We also add fields for relocation preferences. Enabling these template options allows workers to complete these new fields during their employee review:
Skill Interests
Relocation Short Term, To which Locations?
Relocation Long Term, To which Locations?
Talent Marketplace
Workday reduces the time and effort needed to create a flex team. Hosts can quickly create flex teams with high-quality, consistent, action-oriented details. For simple flex teams, improving the description also helps hosts get relevant suggested skills for the team.
As a result, it’s easier for candidates to find appropriate teams and contribute to successful outcomes.
Skills
With the 2026R2 release, Workday delivers a unified skills experience for end users to view and interact with skills. We use skill elements across applications to display and manage talent data. The existing experience varies between product areas, and we now enable product teams to deliver a uniform experience across Workday. Workday plans to add this feature across Workday in stages across multiple releases.
Career Hub
With this release, Workday expands the Career Hub’s role as a centralized location for self-service talent functionality, including performance and development, career exploration and planning, and internal mobility.
We now surface career development and performance reports in the Career Hub, and we enable you to customize the Career Hub through standard hub functionality in Workday. With this update, Workday:
- Improves the findability and user experience of career development and performance tasks.
- Makes it faster and more convenient for workers to view and maintain their talent and performance data in Workday.
- Gives you more options to customize the Career Hub for your organization’s needs.
- Makes the Career Hub available for organizations that do not use Skills Cloud.
Development Items
With this release, workers can link Learning catalog courses directly to their development items using a dedicated Learning field on Development Items. Workers and managers can search the internal Learning catalog and associate active, searchable courses with development goals on standalone Development Item tasks and within Employee Review and Talent Review business processes.
Absence
To simplify client updates following the release of Effective-Dated Service Dates, Workday has updated the existing default Absence fields. Previously, updating these fields required clients to choose between editing current calculations or creating new ones. By updating these fields directly, Workday eliminates the need for manual changes, ensuring calculations always reference the service date active during the evaluated period.
Absence and Time Tracking
Compensation
Payroll
We now enable pay component proration based on work schedule calendar assignments. You can prorate earnings and deductions using the hours or days defined in each worker's assigned work schedule calendars, with separate calculations for each position when a worker holds multiple positions. We also add a new proration calculation.
We introduce a new proration event for Payroll for Australia, Ireland, and the United Kingdom, which triggers proration from midperiod work schedule calendar changes.
With this update, we enhance Workday's ability to support workers with multiple positions across Absence, Payroll, and Time Tracking.
Prorating from work schedule calendars rather than work shift produces calculations that reflect each worker's actual scheduled commitments, which improves accuracy for workers with irregular schedules or multiple positions.
Workday introduces pay accounting reallocation, which enables you to process accounting for a prior payroll period based on retroactive costing allocations that could cause updates to accounting when re-processed. Pay accounting reallocation will make it easier to process multiple payroll accounting adjustments in order to correct accounting on completed payroll results.
Workday now recognizes a single state-level exception and automatically applies it to all associated local resident taxes.
This update simplifies setup and maintenance, especially for states with numerous local taxes, by allowing a single state-level exception instead of separate exceptions for every city, county, and school district.
With this release, we deliver Enhanced Direct Deposit (EDD). EDD enables workers to open or select an existing account from external financial partners through employee self-service payment elections. Payroll for the U.S. customers can use EDD to:
- Enable and offer external financial partners for their workers.
- Retrieve and apply banking details to workers’ payment elections.
EDD enables your workers to select a financial partner and open an account with them. When workers choose to open an account with a partner, Workday automatically updates the workers’ direct deposit payment elections to their new account. If a worker has an existing account with a financial partner, they can choose that partner and Workday will update their direct deposit payment elections as well. This functionality helps save time and reduce errors caused by manual entry of account data.
You can enable or disable the EDD financial partners that your workers can access.
Human Capital Management (HCM)
Mass Job Change on Mass Action Tables allow for processing up to 5,000 workers simultaneously. This functionality supports out-of-sequence events so that future-dated events don't need to be canceled. The new interface highlights changes during a job change and runs real-time checks to prevent downstream errors. Just like with Mass Actions worksheets, mass approvals and other mass actions are supported to substantially reduce processing time (compared to loading Job Changes through EIB for example). There's an opt-in period (irreversible) and this functionality will automatically replace Mass Actions Worksheets for 2027R1.
Workday is moving the Personal Information Change user experience to a templated workflow similar to other templated processes in Workday (Change Job, Job Requisition) where you step through section and are presented with a final review before submitting. This is an opt-in feature. This feature also requires that Personal Information Change be set up as a single Task during the Onboarding business process. You won't see the new user experience if you consolidate it with name or address tasks.
Recruiting
External candidates can upload additional documents to a job application during the apply flow and/or after they submit the application. Candidates assign a document category to each upload so recruiters can quickly identify what was submitted. Recruiters gain visibility into candidate-uploaded documents through a new Recruiter Hub card, an Application Attachments table on the candidate profile, candidate grid columns, and report fields. Administrators can configure security segments, document categories, category groups, and when candidates can upload documents.
Learning
With this release, Workday delivers new tasks and business processes, offering a more flexible and efficient way for administrators and managers to assign learning content.
This update significantly reduces the time learning administrators spend assigning content and allows managers and affiliation managers to directly assign content to their teams without having to enroll them.
Additionally, with this update Workday simplifies retraining management by automatically creating retraining assignments where relevant, using the Complete Learning Assignment business process after the learning is completed.
With this release, Workday delivers a new business process to track the completion of learning assignments and allow learning administrators to configure additional steps and custom notifications after a learner or an extended enterprise learner completes assigned learning content.
Learning administrators have the flexibility to configure additional steps, such as questionnaires, integrations, or reports, to occur immediately after a learner completes their assigned learning.
Benefits
When you use the Relationship report field (on the Related Person for Worker business object) to report on a worker's dependent as of any effective date, we now account for time zone differences and correctly return the dependent's relationship value relative to the selected effective date.
New leave management options on the Get Workers Data API for partners utilizing the Connected Absence use case. You can now use the Wellness Override and Mapping Setup tasks on the Workday Wellness hub to define eligible worker populations and map critical employment contact and absence plan data.
Effective-dated dependent data ensures accurate eligibility tracking, regulatory compliance, and reliable reporting over time.
Workday enables benefits administrators to use the Calculation Engine to create custom logic for your health care rates. This feature provides the flexibility needed to support diverse global requirements and complex proration scenarios.
Student - Records
Student - Core
Student - Financial Aid
Workday now enables you to set the start of the packaging period (SoPP) for Summer Trailer periods based on the typical attendance pattern (TAP). This is configured on your Federal Student Aid Program (FSAP) Policies. This feature can eliminate the need to mass or individually update the SoPP to "Yes" for summer trailer schools.
Workday introduces the ability for students to self-initiate their satisfactory academic progress (SAP) appeals and complete the associated questionnaires directly from the student portal. This update reduces administrative overhead and boosts operation efficiency for you by eliminating the need to manually identify each eligible student and start their SAP appeals.
Reporting
Prior to this release, creating drillable subtotals in a composite report required numerous manual lookup data rows or dynamic data rows. Workday now offers a check box when configuring a combine data row to create automatic subtotals based on a control field in a composite report. This greatly reduces development time and effort
Workday now allows Financials customers to join certain indexed financial data sources together using functionality that is similar to prism (no prism sku needed) with stripped down features. This allows you to create a large data source that contains items normally not reportable together without the use of a composite report. An important thing to keep in mind is that this feature does not currently support security constraints based on hierarchies. For example, you can secure the data by cost center, but not by cost center hierarchy.
Financials - Banking
We now enable you to configure approval workflows for settlement run cancellations.
- Reduces the risk of accidental cancellations.
- Improves oversight and separation of duties.
- Improves documentation for audit purposes.
We deliver new tasks and reports, enabling you to easily:
- Identify bank accounts that use XSLT check print layouts.
- Replace their check print layouts with Report Design layouts.
We plan to retire the new tasks and reports when we retire XSLT check printing. See the Retirement Release Note: XSLT Check Printing link under Related Information. This helps you prepare for the future retirement of XSLT check print layouts to minimize disruptions to your workflows.
Financials - Projects
Business View for Project Cost data source allows for:
- Insight into expenses and committed costs.
- Enables users to create custom reports to analyze details of project and project hierarchies.
Tasks Create Resource Pool, Edit Resource Pool, View Resource Pool have been enhanced, and a new task Update Resource Pool Audience Membership has been created. New View Resource Pools security domain will also be available in the Projects and Resource Scheduling functional areas.
Financials - Business Assets
Allows for migration of Asset Management configuration data and objects between tenants.
Field retired: Business Asset
New Field: Business Assets for Travel Profile
Financials - Core
Workday now lets you set up country-level tax exception rules for expense reports, improving tax accuracy when expenses occur in countries where your company isn't registered.
Home Country Tax Rules: Automatically apply home country tax codes or specific exception rates based on expense items or tax groups, eliminating sole reliance on standard ship-to rules.
Updated Exception Setup: Configure exceptions in the Create Transaction Tax Rule Exception for Country task using the new expense items and transaction tax item group prompts.
Workday now lets you review, approve, and manage recurring journals at the template level before downstream journals are generated.
New Approval Workflow: Set up the Recurring Journal Template Event using the Create Business Process Definition (Default Definition) task to route template edits through approval and review workflows.
Direct Status Tasks: Manage template availability using the Activate Recurring Journal Template, Inactivate Recurring Journal Template, or Cancel Recurring Journal Template tasks directly from the template's related actions menu without triggering a full business process.
Enhanced Controls & Auditing: Revision steps automatically launch the Revise Recurring Journal Template task, templates with history can no longer be deleted, and new Status History and Process History tabs are available on the View Recurring Journal Template report.
Workday now enables you to automatically clear balance sheet journal lines for VAT and other transaction taxes into netting payable or receivable accounts.
Automated Netting Workflows: Create netting entries manually using the Create Tax Declaration Netting Transaction task, or automate creation by adding the initiation step to the Tax Declaration Event business process.
Setup & Configuration: Map destination accounts using the new Tax Declaration Netting Payables and Tax Declaration Netting Receivables account posting rules, and optionally enable worktag-level line grouping in the Edit Tenant Setup - Financials task.
Prerequisites & Limitations: Requires tax reconciliation to be set up beforehand. Note that this feature does not currently support required worktag balancing or alternate ledger currencies.
Workday now supports recurring journal templates that contain multiple transaction currencies and span multiple companies with different ledger currencies.
Expanded Template Capabilities: Create multicompany and multicurrency templates using the Recurring Journal Generation task or the Put Recurring Journal Template web service.
Setup Requirements: Template line amounts must self-balance by company, and the No Intercompany Payable/Receivable Lines when Journals Self Balance by Company checkbox must be enabled in the Edit Tenant Setup - Financials task.
